Gmail outage affected only 2% of users, says Google

Google's Gmail has suffered an outage, an unusual event for the popular email service, which became inaccessible by thousands of users earlier today. Plenty of folks took to Twitter to voice their complaints, but according to Google, the outage affected less than 2 percent of its users.

Affected users were met with a 500 error page when they attempted to access their Gmail accounts this morning. Google quickly became aware of the issue and did acknowledge the problem on its Apps Dashboard, but did not go into detail as to what might have caused the downtime.

We're aware that some users are experiencing an error when accessing their Gmail. We’ve implemented a fix and users should be able to access their mail shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for your patience.

Not long after reports on the outage made the rounds, Google updated that the problem has been resolved, but still offered no explanation.

The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.